Film

THE GLOW OF WHITE WOMEN

6:00pm
Sunday, November 16
Castro Theater, San Francisco
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Director: Yunus Vally
Country/Year: South Africa, 2007
Running Time: 78 mins
Format: DVCam
Language: English

Filmmaker Yunus Vally was convinced that the promised virgins of paradise would all be white. Born and raised in Nelspruit, a deeply racist town in provincial South Africa, Vally grew up in a Muslim family, attended Mosque five times daily and dreamed of paradise. But as a young man, Vally decided he wanted to find out if the promised virgins were worth the wait. This creatively composed and humorous film looks at white women in the Dark Continent and explores the forbidden sexual desires of blacks and whites under Apartheid. Probing and provocative, The Glow of White Women explores one man's desire and taboo. --Sarah Whitehouse

From the filmmaker's website:
The Glow Of White Women is a frank, funny and slyly subversive account of his life from a child in a sleepy Afrikaans town who spent every afternoon in the madressah to a young man in post-apartheid South Africa where all the rules have been rewritten.

The film is inventively put together using images from vintage magazines, the covers of pulp novels, anatomical drawings and family photographs as well as archive news footage, South African tourism promotional films and commercials for skin whitening creams.

Interviewees include Evita Bezuidenhout (Pieter-Dirk Uys), the radical drag queen who will be running for president of South Africa in 2009; Charlene Smith, the South African journalist who entered into a public debate with President Mbeki over black male sexuality after she was raped at knifepoint in her own home, and – most illuminatingly – Yunus Vally’s former white lovers.